The Top 10 Movies of 1968

1968 was a year of assassinations, student revolts, and war… but a kid-friendly musical called Oliver!won Best Picture. It’s a fun confection, but it hasn’t exactly maintained its place in the public consciousness. It was looking backwards, while Flickchart’s top 10 movies for the year were either looking ahead into an unknown future or capturing something about the contested spirit of their era. Entries #7, #4, and #3 reflect filmmakers’ awareness about the disputed nature of family and social hierarchies, #8 and #1 take inspiration from the crescendoing space race, and #2 and #5 bring startling new sensibilities to old genres. All of these films have stood the 50-year test of time, according to Flickchart users; when you’ve scrolled through them, share your own rankings for 1968 in the comments below.

Over a career that lasted decades, Ingmar Bergman had a remarkably productive career as a film director. He is mostly remembered for a singular kind of challenging film, but in fact he made a wide variety of movies that range from the madcap farce of All These Women (1964) to the enigmatic and daunting Hour of the Wolf. The latterhas quite a few of his trademark touches, namely abstract and surreal imagery, yet it is also something nearly unique: an early attempt at “found footage” (Shirley Clarke’s The Connection is the only earlier pure attempt I can think of). An opening note informs the audience that this movie about the disappearance of Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) is based on his journal and the remembrances of his wife Alma (Liv Ullmann), who addresses the camera directly in documentary fashion. Things start to get weird when Alma is directed to her husband’s journal by a mysterious old woman (Naima Wilfstrand) who at first claims to be 216 years old before revising that number down to 76, proving that we all lie about our age.

Like many nightmare scenarios, it all starts innocently, with Johan and Alma arriving at the island where they will henceforth reside. Soon enough they find that they are not alone, as they are invited to dinner by Baron von Merkens (Erland Josephson), who actually owns the island. Hell is other people, and it is also lack of sleep for Johan, who is plagued by a childish fear of the dark and also by visions. Throughout the movie Bergman displays a mastery of time, beginning with Johan’s statement about an eternity being located in a moment. Bergman is concerned not with just a moment, but with a lifetime, and he explores it in a crisp 95 minutes. – Walter J. Montie

Based on the now-iconic Neil Simon play, the film certainly has a play-like focus, in that the acting and the dialogue is the center of attention. It’s hard to think of an acting team that could fill the written roles as well as Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. What makes this movie the definitive performance of the play is the thing that is at the heart of most great comedy: the melancholy beneath the laughter. Lemmon has an anxiousness to his demeanor that comes across even in scripts that don’t point it out, and it’s hard to name many scenes in Matthau’s career where he looked happy. These darker tones help to ground the comedic banter and make the movie a subconsciously emotional experience as well as an entertaining one. And it is wildly entertaining; the dialogue is clever, the situations get sillier and sillier, and Lemmon and Matthau have brilliant comedic timing together. Even when you can tell what’s coming next because their characters are purposefully so predictable, their delivery still hits all the right comedic notes. It’s a rare beast of a comedy that holds up to serious scrutiny while also being laugh-out-loud funny. – Hannah Keefer

It’s known as one of the great twist endings in cinema history. Yet unlike, say, The Sixth Sense or Se7en, Planet of the Apes doesn’t lose any of its effectiveness if the twist is spoiled. That’s because Planet of the Apes doesn’t lean on its twist to thrill its audience. It’s a sharp social satire and a rollicking adventure. It’s also the granddaddy of all modern science fiction franchises. Without it, Star Trek would not be traveling so far Beyond, Star Wars wouldn’t be down to its Last Jedi, and the Avengers wouldn’t be fighting their Infinity War. Though it hailed from an era when sequels automatically meant diminishing returns, Planet of the Apes found its legs because of its perfect blend of Charlton Heston‘s star power, biting social critique, spectacular makeup effects, and “what if?” flights of fancy. Given the success of the trilogy of modern Apes films that concluded just last year, it’s also a franchise with plenty still to say. – Nigel Druitt

Before Game of Thrones, before The Tudors, before The Crown, audiences thrilled to the shocking, foul-mouthed, comical inhumanity of the Plantagenets. The Lion in Winter peeks in on the philandering Henry II of England (Peter O’Toole), the “great bitch” of a wife he keeps locked up in a tower except on Christmas (Katharine Hepburn), and their scheming, conniving, potentially kinslaying sons as they take a royal family vacation in 12th-century France. Future James Bond Timothy Dalton makes his film debut as the young King of France, who tries to arrange a favorable marriage match for his sister while flirting with the future King Richard the Lionheart, played by a young Anthony Hopkins. The movie’s dialogue, from the play by James Goldman, is as witty and rapid-fire as Sorkin, as bawdy and baroque as Shakespeare, and as thick with intrigue and entendres as George R.R. Martin. If you think of period pieces as stuffy and humorless, or find the British royal family dull, you just haven’t seen The Lion in Winter. – David Conrad

While Bullitt is mostly known for its exciting chase sequence, there is much more going in this excellent film, on multiple levels, than the average police procedural.

Take for instance, the intriguing double mystery that is at the heart of the movie — a mystery foreshadowed in the opening credits sequence of smoke and mirrors, set to a snappy Lalo Schifrin score. The question is not only who shot and killed a mob informer in a fleabag hotel located near the thankfully long-destroyed Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco and seriously wounded a police detective assigned to guard him, but why did the victim unlock the door so his killers could enter? This is what consumes Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen, in one of his most iconic roles) as he and his colleague Delgetti (Don Gordon) methodically work the case. It is important to note that Frank’s approach is one of mutual respect and politeness; the character beat that got the most applause at the screening I attended last year is an unspoken conversation between Frank and Dr. Willard (Georg Stanford Brown), an African American surgeon, about ambitious City Councilman Chalmers (Robert Vaughn, taking unctuousness to about 15) who is seeking to demean Dr. Willard; Bullitt and Willard’s exchange could be interpreted as “Isn’t this guy a jackass?” “Yeah, tell me about it.” There’s also a good cop/bad cop routine that even Miss Manners would approve of. On the other hand, the movie also suggests that just maybe Frank is too accustomed to the criminal milieu he spends so much time around.

The career of director Peter Yates proved an up-and-down one. He preceded this, his first Hollywood film, with Robbery, a neat caper with a chase scene of its very own. He followed up Bullitt with Peter and Mary, a French New Wave-influenced film starring Mia Farrow and Dustin Hoffman. Academy Award nominations for Breaking Away and The Dresser followed, with other excellent and varied work in The Hot Rock, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and Eyewitness, as well as mediocre efforts like For Pete’s Sake and Suspect. Bullitt is the one people remember, though, and not just because of a car chase. – Walter

While Mel Brooks is best known for his goofy parody films (Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights in particular), going back little further in his filmography reveals hits are more satirical than silly. The Producers is a prime example of this, a larger-than-life showbiz comedy about greed, art, and art criticism. It’s often remembered only for its controversial “Springtime for Hitler” musical number, the title song of the titular producers’ sure-to-fail Broadway show. But, like any good satire, there is rich context that makes that controversial choice more than meets the eye. In a sense, The Producers is a meta story about satire itself. The leads’ attempt to create a genuinely terrible play yields a production so awful that critics can only assume it to be satirical — a sort of reverse Poe’s Law. This then raises questions about author intention and the value of satire that, in turn, can be applied right back to The Producers (though Brooks more clearly intends to satirize). And if this sounds too in-depth for a comedy, rest assured that The Producers is also just flat-out hilarious. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder are perfect foils for each other. Mostel was a comedic theatre actor, and you can see it in how joyfully he hams it up for the camera. Wilder’s neuroticism is positively subtle in comparison — most of the time. One of the funniest early scenes features Wilder’s character melting down, putting Mostel in the role of the calm, reassuring one, and the role reversal works because both actors have already so strongly established their characters as the inverse. There’s just so much to like about this film, and while some satires lose their spark 50 years after their debut, The Producers still shines. – Hannah

One night during my sophomore year of college, my roommates and indeed much of the dorm had either gone home for the weekend or were out for the night. I commenced my Friday night routine of walking down to the dollar video store to rent some movies. I decided on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I walked back to my dorm room, made myself a sandwich, set up my combination TV/VCR, turned off the lights, and pressed play. Ten minutes later, when Barbara finally makes it into the farmhouse, I realized I had the partially eaten sandwich in my hand, frozen in place about halfway to mouth, which was hanging open. I closed my mouth and swallowed, slowly put the sandwich down, paused the movie, turned on the lights, and paced the room for awhile. Then I turned the lights back off, ate my sandwich, and finished my introduction to what is possibly the greatest horror film ever made. Sometimes even now, sixteen years later, I’ll get in my car and close the door and suddenly think about that zombie frantically banging on the glass and tugging at the handle, and a shiver will run down my spine. – Tom Kapr

At this point, Rosemary’s Baby’s plot points have perhaps been overdone to the point of being tropes. Yet not a single imitator has matched the chills of Roman Polanski’s original Satanic horror. With fantastic leading performances from Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, and Sidney Blackmer, the film is juggernaut in the paranoia subgenre populated by horror and drama/thriller films alike. Polanski’s direction creates an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia and growing unease. We sense along with Farrow that something isn’t right as the film plays on our underlying fears – both “male” and “female” fears – about pregnancy, child rearing, and the human condition. The film uses the mundane to create unforgettable images. Just last week, internet memers seized on Kate Middleton introducing her baby to the world while wearing a dress bearing an unsettling resemblance to the one worn by Farrow in the film. Reactions like that demonstrate the lasting and unnerving effect Polanski’s film has had in the public conscious. With a wry sense of dark humor about it as well, Rosemary’s Baby remains a horror classic with an ending you can’t forget. – Connor Adamson

After making A Fistful of Dollars earlier in the decade, director Sergio Leone‘s films became increasingly operatic, with larger than life characters, heightened realities, and iconic musical scores by the Maestro of cinema, Ennio Morricone. Once Upon a Time in the West was the first film Leone made after his successful Dollars trilogy, and it remains the pinnacle of his operatic style. The film follows four main characters (played by Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, and Jason Robards), each with his or her own leitmotif. This is the only film I have ever just listened to, without watching, for its entire nearly three-hour running time; and it still works dramatically. You know who just entered the scene by the change in music. Leone did all of his sound design (including dialogue) in post-production, and here, with Morricone’s music, he creates a soundscape that can tell a fully realized story with no visual aspect whatsoever. That’s not to say the film doesn’t also look amazing, of course; it’s one of the greatest films of all time in that regard as well. But it’s a rare film that can work this well as a purely aural experience. – Tom

This film is often mistakenly filed as “merely” a landmark science fiction film, or the first great expression of Kubrick‘s genius in color, and it is certainly both of these things. But to simply chuck superlatives at it is to be naive about its severely obtuse arthouse sensibilities and to undersell the film’s truly remarkable technical achievements. The 1960s were a transformative time for both the culture and the medium, and despite aeronautics having crossed into mainstream culture thanks to the Space Race, only one other film in Flickchart’s top 20 sci-fi films of the 60s could be said to be a serious “space film” — Bava’s influential but cheap Planet of the Vampires. Space sci-fi was still, in the minds of many, an adolescent subgenre, the realm of your Flash Gordons and your Barbarellas.

But rather than pave the way by making a fun, palatable space opera that discussed serious topics through simplistic metaphors (like Star Trek was trying to do over on NBC), Kubrick instead leapfrogged over all of the intermediary steps and showed us a future where all the things we were thinking were going to be so amazing (spaceflight, zero-grav walking, intelligent machines) had already outlived all of their novelty and were now part of a banal landscape dotted with other familiar banalities like Howard Johnsons, Pan-Am, and hideous airport furniture. But just as we were starting to think the message was a nihilistic one, a deep vein of weirdness and awe opens up beneath us, fueled by Kubrick’s essential strangeness and by the simple fact that space is big, really big, and if you just let your mind sit with that terrifying reality for a couple hours and watch other humans struggle to maintain a grip on their humanity in the face of unprecedented emotional challenges, you will come away with the apotheosis of all science-fiction-induced emotions: pants-shitting wonder. – Doug van Hollen

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Henry Fonda is Frank Beardsley, a widower with ten children. Lucille Ball is Helen North, a widow with eight children. They meet, fall in love, and get married. I mean, it doesn’t happen that easily: first they have to navigate the swingin’ 60s dating scene and get past Frank’s sons nearly giving Helen alcohol poisoning. (Nobody plays drunk like Lucille Ball.) And marriage makes things no less easy, as 18 children and teenagers have to figure out how to live together. This film has some wonderful scenes; one of my favorites involves Helen’s young son Philip butting heads with his teacher as he insists on using his new (but not legal) last name. Another involves Frank’s eldest son defending his new step-sister’s honor against her loser boyfriend. I guess my favorite thing about this movie is seeing the kids’ tribal hatred slowly evolve into affection. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here, and the multiple narrator framework doesn’t flow as well as it could, but it remains a warm and timeless story (based on a book by the real Helen Beardsley) about two families melding into one. It is anchored by its two leads as well as Van Johnson, Tim Matheson in one of his earliest roles, and a memorable cast of youngsters.

Toshiro Mifune, who grew up in Japan-occupied Manchuria, served in World War II in the aerial photography wing of the Imperial Japanese Army. Lee Marvin, who enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, was wounded at the Battle of Saipan. Years later, after both men had won renown as gruff, sour-faced, masculine actors — Marvin in cowboy movies, Mifune in samurai movies — their worlds collided again for one of the most remarkable war movies ever conceived. One of the smallest, too; they’re the only actors in it. Director John Boorman had worked with Marvin before, on the previous year’s stylish mod-noir Point Blank. Mifune had worked overseas before, including in the American film Grand Prix, but neither he nor Marvin had attempted anything like Hell in the Pacific. Its script includes a couple of clipped monologues, but no real “dialogue,” no true verbal communication between the actors. Alone on a small Pacific island, the marooned American sailor and the isolated Japanese holdout try to outmaneuver and murder each other with elaborate traps and survival tactics, but eventually reach a tense stalemate. Even Boorman seemed unsure how long that stalemate would last, so he filmed two versions of the ending. Hell in the Pacific was not well-received by contemporary audiences, who may have felt adrift in the movie’s unconventional narrative, but it holds a fascinating place in the filmographies of an inventive director and two iconic actors separated by a shared ocean.

Though Peter Bogdanovich is best known for The Last Picture Show, his first feature Targets shouldn’t be overlooked. It treads some similar ground, being both very modern and quite nostalgic in a cinema-specific way. Targets tells a dual story; first, a troubled young man kills his family and then takes a rifle to the top of a water tower and starts picking off passing motorists. Second, an aging actor (Boris Karloff) prepares for a screening of his best-known film, a monster movie that typecast him forever in monster movies. Of course, this closely parallels Karloff’s own experience with Frankenstein, and Targets is the best opportunity to see Karloff in a role that more closely resembles his actual self: an erudite and well-spoken man who could just as easily have been the movies’ greatest Shakespearean interpreter if his career had gone a little differently. The shooter plot is scarily contemporary, and the two plots come together in a way that foregrounds the power of cinema at least as well as Tarantino’s wish fulfillment in Inglourious Basterds. If you love cinema, and why else are you reading this, don’t miss Targets.

David has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He loves foreign films, westerns, war flicks, and has read nearly every word J.R.R. Tolkien ever wrote. David lived in Japan for three years and is always eager to talk about it. Follow him on Twitter at @davidaconrad or email him at david@flickchart.com.

1-Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
2-2001: A Space Odyssey(I might watch this on the Big Screen this Month)
3-Planet of the Apes
4-Bullitt
5-Night of the Living Dead
6-Funny Girl
7-Once Upon a Time in the West
8-The Boston Strangler
9-Yellow Submarine
10-The Love Bug.